Followers

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

When I first learned that my approval was delayed because I
neglected to specify that what was going into the cabinet was ‘servers,
storage, and network gear’, I was surprised. That’s pretty much what goes into
every cabinet in the data center and seemed obvious to the point of being silly.
I thought that it was petty and you were trying to prove a point about who was
in control and that I should know my place – boy was I wrong.

I have since learned why that question is on the list,
because I had a face-to-face discussion with the customer about what they are
ACTUALLY going to put in their cabinets. The inventory is as follows:

An Easy-Bake Oven™ which will constantly be churning out
cookie versions of the Linux and FreeBSD mascots.

A miniature horse that can recite verbatim Shakespeare’s
Richard the 3rd- except for the line “A horse, a horse! My kingdom
for a horse!” for which it substitutes stomping its hoof four times.

At the bottom of the cabinet they will need D/C power to
feed a 4U device that acts as a portal to Narnia.

The ‘storage’ part is technically correct, but somehow, a
scientist has managed to harvest and store actual thinking power (“short term
IQ points” is how they describe it.) Since the center is in Philadelphia, they
plan on traveling to the machine, taking a ‘boost’ and then go to the nearest
park where they will play speed chess and scream “Look at me! I’m Bobby
Fischer!”

Legendary B-Movie actor Bruce Campbell is going in and will
need keys to unlock the cabinet Tuesdays and Thursdays at 2 PM to sign
autographs and act cool.

They will have an Intrusion Detection Server that, when
discovering an attack, will fire a volley from a bank of unicorn horns that
will search out the perpetrator and poke him continuously until he powers off
his computer, reports himself to the authorities and promises not to do it ever
again.

On loan from the National Museum of History are: the ruby
red slippers from the Wizard of Oz, the original Kermit the Frog puppet, a The Man From U.N.C.L.E. lunchbox, and
the white gloves worn by Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen
Prefer Blondes – which will need special cooling, hence the door with the
fan on the back of the cabinet.

Their main web cluster is utilizing bleeding edge technology
using low level design based on biological organisms. This was new to me, but
essentially an arachnid is responsible for the true/false determination of each
bit by contact to the board with its leg. Eight arachnids make a 64 bit
processing motherboard. I asked how on earth they could represent zero and he
reminded me that during POST (Planting Of Stationary Thread) the have a method
to simply raise themselves up by the thread anchored to the case. It takes up ¼
of one of the cabinets, but it’s so efficiently tuned for their text heavy web
traffic that it makes sense for them (CHAR. LOTS WEB Servers)

Somehow they captured a fire salamander who maintains his form
of fire while speaking Layer 3 protocols. It handles all their IP access list,
VPN termination configs, VLANs, etc. and has several 10 Gig-E connections – so
it’s a much better fit than an ASA5520. However, they are worried about it
eating their web servers.

Legend has it that that there have been a series of numbers
passed down through the centuries as a warning of a great and malevolent being.
Some say it represents a day and time, others say that it can be translated
into GPS coordinates. One group that has been gaining attention is a small team
of researchers in Istanbul that claim it’s an address, floor number and space
ID of the cabinet where it all begins. Their most controversial work is based
on the palimpsest of Archimedes which claims in extraordinary detail that the
foretold “rising and laying waste of the cities of man” could be avoided by an
Excel spreadsheet with the question “Are you going to place anything inside
your cabinet which may spiral out of control and destroy humanity as we know
it?” with a pull-down response of Yes/No. (I sent the customer the sheet and
they selected No, so I think we are all good on that front. I know Nostradamus
said that it has to be in WKS format, but I think that guy is a scam artist to
begin with and who uses MS Works nowadays anyways, right?!)

In any case, I’ve learned my lesson. No more questioning the
usefulness of any forms I may be asked to complete – even if they fly in the face
of reason and efficiency. It may save the world someday!